The Toppled Bollard: radical direct marketing in practice

More from the lectures of Billy the Dog McGraw, at the Toppled Bollard, Corby

One of my earliest experiences which taught me that common sense in direct marketing is bunkum came with a client about 25 years ago – long before the days of digital, before the days of the ball point pen, in fact back in the days when Liverpool could win the football league.

In those dim and distant past times we used to advise customers to do a test mailshot of maybe between 300 and 1000 random addresses (the exact number depends on the response rate one expects).  Then if the results were as they wished, they should send out the rest of the mailing as fast as possible, pausing only to avoid public holidays, and a chance to visit the Toppled Bollard (wild cheers from the floor and gallery).

It was during this time that I had a client who was selling books to schools.  He did the mailing and got a response rate of 4% with his leaflet, which was very good indeed.  We were happy, he was happy, the Royal Mail were happy, and my dear wife Betise was happy because I had just bought her a new dish cloth (cries of shame from the assembled throng).

The client went away and returned 10 days later with the leaflets to do a full mailing.  He had done 1000 primary schools in the UK chosen at random, and wanted to go on and do the remaining 23,000.

The mailing items went straight to our warehouses, and the job was processed.  I thought no more of it, and saved my nervous energies for thinking of my new Elvis Lookalike costume that I was planning to wear at the gig and the “Sheep in the Duckpond” on saturday night.  

(Cries of “give us a song you old pancake” from the floor.)

You can imagine my surprise when, two weeks later, the same customer called me and demanded to know why his leaflets had not gone out.  I checked the schedule (in those days it was written in chalk on a blackboard) and confirmed that all was hunky-dory, and other names of David Bowie songs.

The client however was adamant.  He had had no replies so it could not have gone out.  After all, what else could be the reason for the test mailing?I checked and asked him if he had given us exactly the same leaflets to send out, and he said yes.

So there was much too-ing and fro-ing, and nothing was resolved, and so, on the basis that no one has a brain as big as mine (well, local people use the word “head” instead of “brain” but they mean well), I decided to take the horn by the bull and go and investigate myself.I got out the file for the current job, and for the original test job, and looked at the schedule, the dates, checked to see that no princesses had died that day, and looked again.And the answer was staring me straight in my blue suede shoes.  

The customer had not sent out the same leaflet as before.  He had originally sent out a single colour flyer.  The second time he had sent out a full colour version.

When we challenged him on the topic he still maintained that it was the same.  Only better.  ”The leaflet is the same,” he protested, “except that it is in colour.  Everyone knows that colour works better.  It is common sense.”

Sad in the heart I took him to one side and said, no it is not true that colour always works better.  It is all a matter of the psychology of perception – the way the brain sees the page and how the mind reacts.   It is quite common for colour not to work as well as mono in direct mail shots.  

In fact there is a whole section on this on the Theory of Direct Mail site, www.theory.bz  (Wild cheers from the audience in the Toppled Bollard).  

Go to the articles and look at the alphabetical list.

——————————

Billy the Dog McGraw, expert on direct marketing and Elvis impersonator, speaks regularly at the Toppled Bollard, Corby, home of the direct marketing intelligentsia in the East Midlands.  

Regretably Billy is helping Her Majesty’s officers with some small matter of vote rigging in the House of Commons, and so can’t take personal calls, but if you venture to 01536 399 000 and ask for Tony, then I might be able to help a little.If you want to know more, there’s lots onwww.hamilton-house.com 

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »